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In Scotland witchcraft became a statutory crime in 1563, and the first large-scale witch trials
began in 1591. Scotland had an entirely different legal system, social structure, and church from
those in England. But neither England nor Scotland can be studied any longer in isolation. As
James Sharpe, the best recent historian of witchcraft in England, has said, "It is now, I would
contend, impossible to sustain the idea that there was a separate 'English' witchcraft to be set
against a monolithic 'Continental' witchcraft: the English experience of the phenomenon was a
variation on a European theme."12 That theme was
profound; the best recent estimates suggest that around one hundred and ten thousand people
were tried for witchcraft in different parts of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
and that between forty and sixty thousand were executed. These numbers, of course, only
become useful when measured in the context of other instances of crime and punishment and
other kinds of judicial practice.
 
One of the best-known instances of the wave of persecutions occurred at Trier beginning in 1588. 
It included the trial and execution of the electoral magistrate and former rector of the university,
Dietrich Flade, in 1589. The prosecutions in Trier did not go unnoticed elsewhere. 
Martin Del Rio, the polymath, humanist, former high ranking official of the
government of the Spanish Netherlands in the Council of  Brabant, and later a Jesuit, published
his Disquisitionum Magicarum libri sex in 1599-1601 at Louvain. The work was first
reprinted in 1608 and became the most recognized and influential justification for the
prosecution of witches.13 Del Rio had attended the
lectures on magic and witchcraft given by Juan Maldonado at the University of Paris in the
1570s, where one of his fellow students was Pierre de Lancre, who became a judge in the
Labourd and the author of an important tract on witchcraft.14 Del Rio was familiar with the Flade case and the other
persecutions at Trier, and his work was influential in triggering later prosecutions at Cologne and
in Bavaria, as well as influencing prosecutions in neighboring Luxemburg.15
 
Popular beliefs about--and fears of --witchcraft survived longer than the mass persecutions and
the willingness of courts to accept and try accusations of the crime of witchcraft. Generally, the
refusal of elites, including magistrates and judges, from accepting charges of witchcraft for trial
was one of the most prominent features of the decline of prosecutions and, eventually, beliefs. 
So, according to Ian Bostridge, was the influence of shifting political programs. By the end of the
seventeenth century, belief in the reality of witchcraft could be marginalized and dismissed
simply as the program of one political faction by members of another.16 Philosophical scepticism also contributed to the
reluctance to prosecute, as did a growing transformation of theories of material causation and the
limitations on the use of evidence derived from supernatural sources.
 
Among theologians on both sides of the Reformation divide, the idea of divine providence being
more benevolent--and of the devil's influence being more restricted--took hold. In addition, social
and intellectual elites began to withdraw from a mental and cultural world that they had long
shared with the general population, and the condemnation of popular beliefs--including beliefs
concerning sorcery and witchcraft--as erroneous increased during the later seventeenth
century.17

THE HISTORICAL RECORD

As long as the widespread certainties of the criminal nature of witchcraft and the actual
prosecutions lasted, however, they left a substantial record, one that informs us of far more than
witchcraft itself. Most of this record exists in the archives and other records of courts, but it is
difficult to extract these materials from the jurisdictional contexts in which they are imbedded
without writing regional history, in which particular movements of prosecution are linked to
local social and political stress points and the general local use of criminal law.18 Occasionally, accounts of individual trials and regional
prosecutions are described, paraphrased, or summarized in the independent literature of
demonology and witchcraft that is the subject of this website. It is always useful to consider the
relation between particular instances and localities of persecution and individual works in the
theoretical literature. There is often a correlation.

-notes-

12James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness,
32.

13Lea, Materials, II, 640-646; Clark, 535; De
Ridder-Symoens, "Intellectual and Political Backgrounds;" Julio Caro Baroja, "Martín del Rio y
sus Disquisiciones mágicas," in El señor Inquisidor y otras vidas por oficio (Madrid,
1968), 171-196; E. Fischer, Die ‘Disquisitionum Magicarum libri sex' von Martin Delrio als
gegenreformatorische Exempel-Quelle (Bamberg, 1975); Briggs, Witches and
Neighbors, 347-351.

14Clark, 535; Margaret M. McGowan, "Pierre de
Lancre's Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons: The Sabbat
Sensationalized," in Anglo, The Damned Art, 182-201, at 187; Lea, Materials,
III, 1292-1304.

15Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in
Bavaria.  On Luxemburg, see Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, "La répression de la sorcellerie
dans le Duché de Luxembourg aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Une analyse des structures de pouvoir
et de leur fonctionnement dans le cadre de la chasse aux sorcières," in Prophètes et sorcières
dans les Pays-Bas XVIe-XVIIe siècle, Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, Willem Frijhoff,
Robert Muchembled (Paris, 1978), 41-154, at 78-86.

16Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations,
c. 1650-c. 1750 (Oxford, 1997). For the broader political and juridical background, see
Clark, Thinking with Demons, 549-682.

17The classic study on this point is that of Natalie
Zemon Davis, "Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors," in Davis, Society and Culture in
Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 227-267.  Most histories of the idea and the
persecutions discuss the end of the persecutions. There is a particularly useful collection of
essays in Von Unfug de Hexen-Prozesses. Gegner der Hexenverfolgung von Johann Weyer
bis Friedrich Spee, Wolfenbüteler Forschungen, Band. 55, Hartmut Lehmann and Otto
Ulbricht, eds. (Wiesbaden, 1992), and Das Ende der Hexenverfolgung, Sönke Lorenz and
Dieter Bauer, eds. (Stuttgart, 1995), Hexenforschung, Vol. I. On recent research in
Germanophone areas, see Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany and
Switzerland.

18Excellent examples are the work of H. C. Erik
Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972);
Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981); Paravy,
De la chrétienté romaine à la réforme en Dauphiné; Hexenprozesse. Deutsche und
skandinavische Beiträge, Christian Degn, Hartmut Lehmann, Dagmar Unverhau, eds.
(Neumünster, 1983); Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, Bengt
Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford, 1990); Wolfgang Behringer,
Hexenverfolgung in Bayerb, Volksmagie, Glaubenseifer und Staaträson in der Frühen
Neuzeit (Munich, 1987; Eng. Trans., Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular magic,
religious zealotry and reason of state in early modern Europe, J.C. Grayson and David
Lededrer, trans. [Chicago, 1971]); Muchembled, Magie et sorcellerie en Europe.